A new book by two ECS academics considers the changes in our private and public lives that have been caused by pervasive computing and the Web.

In the book,'The Spy in the Coffee Machine (The end of privacy as we know it), the authors Dr Kieron O'Hara and Professor Nigel Shadbolt of ECS consider our new state of global hypersurveillance. They suggest that as we increasingly resort to technology for our work and play, our electronic activity leaves behind digital footprints that can be used to track our movements. In our cars, telephones, even our coffee machines, tiny computers communicating wirelessly via the Internet can serve as miniature witnesses, forming powerful networks whose emergent behaviour can be very complex, intelligent, and invasive. The question is: how much of an infringement on privacy are they?

Exposing the invasion of our privacy from CCTVs to blogs, Dr O'Hara and Professor Shadbolt explore what — if anything — we can do to prevent it from disappearing forever in the digital age.

The book is published by Oneworld Publications.

A technical seminar from Williams F1 was the highlight of this year's IEEE student branch calendar.

Stuart O'Neill, from the Electronics Department at the Williams Formula 1 team, gave an interesting and interactive talk on the history, state-of-the art, and future of electronics in the motor sport. He brought along a number of items including steering wheels and chassis computers from F1 cars (with some historical items from the early days of the sport) which students were invited to handle during and after the talk.

Stuart has been with Williams for seven years and has worked on projects including the steering wheel, sub-dash, and embedded software design. He gave an informal history of electronics in F1, and spoke about the implications of the 2008 Concorde agreement and the development of Kinetic Energy Recovery Systems which will make an appearance in 2009. He also shared a number of anecdotes about the design of cars and the politics of the sport.

This well attended talk continues the success of the University of Southampton IEEE student branch, which has recently received accolades for its website and membership growth. The branch runs a full calendar of technical and careers seminars, along with site visits and other events throughout the year. Run by students from the School of Electronics and Computer Science, it carries out an important role in connecting students with employers and encouraging professional development.

Joan Irwin, Project Manager of Simply Health, visited the School at the invitation of ECSWomen.

Joan gave an entertaining and inspiratational talk on her career in IT, focusing on the changes and developments in the industry, her career development as a woman in the industry,and passing on some really valuable lessons learned.

'Hearing from a woman with sustained senior-level experience in IT was really beneficial,' said Kathryn Macarthur. 'It provided a role model for an industry which is perceived to be predominantly male.'

This talk was something of a new departure for ECSWomen, which has up to now heard mostly technical presentations. ECSWomen was formed earlier in this academic year with the aim of promoting and encouraging women to follow technology-related careers. Speakers have included Rachel Burnett, President of the British Computer Society, and Professor Lillian Edwards of the University of Southampton School of Law.

ECSS - The Electronics and Computer Science Society - won first prize for their web site and publicity at the Students' Union EVA awards.

The EVAs - Excellence in Volunteering Awards - are given annually on a competitive basis to the student societies affiliated to the University's Students' Union.

This year's awards ceremony was held at Southampton Guildhall, and ECSS was awarded first prize for the best web site and publicity, beating the other shortlisted societies, which were the University Concert Band, the Investment Society, Showstoppers and Wessex Films.

'This is the first time ECSS has won an award,' said James Snowdon, an ECSS committee member. 'It's obviously a fantastic achievement for the Society and we are all very proud.'

A new ‘artificial’ airway being developed in a test tube by ECS researchers could help develop better therapies for asthma and allergy sufferers and reduce the need for animal testing.

This development will benefit people with asthma, whose airways (breathing passages) are sensitive to pollen, dust, animal fur and viruses which cause them to be inflamed, making it hard to breathe.

Academics at the University of Southampton are working with the National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) on this project.

Principal Investigator on the project, Donna Davies, Professor of Respiratory, Cell and Molecular Biology in the University’s Infection, Inflammation and Repair division, is working with Professor Hywel Morgan of the University's School of Electronics and Computer Science to construct the artificial airways.

NC3Rs provides a UK focus for the promotion, development and implementation of the 3Rs in animal research and testing. The airways, which are being developed over a two and a half year period, will be made using tissue engineering. Layers of the cells that make up the airway tissue will be grown inside a micro-fluidic device. The cells will be grown on a tiny membrane that will allow access to both sides (the air and blood) of the cells. The device will allow researchers to fully understand how lung function is affected by air particles and allergens and to test their effects without animal testing.

'This new model will allow us to measure the transport of materials and the challenges the airways are presented with,' said Professor Hywel Morgan. The new Mountbatten Building at the University, due for completion later this year will make it possible to develop the microfluidic devices needed to take this research forward.

Fifteen years ago (30 April 1993) CERN announced that the Web could be used free by anyone. To mark the anniversary three ECS professor comment for the BBC on the Web's future.

Today, 30 April 2008, in a commemorative article on BBC's Technology web site, three ECS professors: Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Wendy Hall and Professor Nigel Shadbolt comment on their hopes for the Web's future.

The three professors, who are all members of the School's Intelligence, Agents and Multimedia research group, are founder directors of the Web Science Research Initiative, a long-term research collaboration between ECS at Southampton and CSAIL at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Tim Berners-Lee comments: 'What's exciting is that people are building new social systems, new systems of review, new systems of governance. My hope is that those will produce... new ways of working together effectively and fairly which we can use globally to manage ourselves as a planet.'

First-year Computer Science student Carly Wilson will be part of the England Taekwondo Senior team competing at the European Championships in Poland this month.

After taking up Taekwondo six years ago, Carly was hooked after just one lesson. Over the years she has steadily improved her status and, as well as competing internationally she is working towards her Third Dan (the ‘Dans’ in Taekwondo are the stages which comes after the ‘Black Belt’ stage).

There are nine Dans in Taekwondo and each one takes progressively longer than the previous one. Carly hopes to achieve her Third Dan later this year, but forecasts that it will be many years before she reaches the ninth.

Taekwondo originated in Korea as a martial art and combat sport. Its popularity – it is now the most popular martial art in the world in terms of number of practitioners – has resulted in the sport developing in different ways. World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) is an Olympic sport which is sparring-based with full contact. International Taekwondo Federation (ITF), which is Carly’s sport, is a more traditional style, with semi-contact in matches.

Carly will be competing in Poland between 16 and 18 May, in the 2nd Dan patterns section.

Later in the summer she is also going to Spain for a four nations tournament involving Portugal, Spain, Germany and England, then spending time in training and competitions in readiness for the World Cup in Italy in October.

Accelerating the development of drugs to treat malaria and avian flu is one potential benefit from new grid software which has just been released.

The software has been developed by OMII-Europe, a two-year European Union- funded project led by the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS).

OMII-Europe provides world-wide leadership on the integration of major grid computing platforms together with the implementation of emerging open standards to facilitate benefits for the wider community. Forthcoming versions of Europe’s main grid platforms such as UNICORE and gLite will incorporate software developed by OMII-Europe so that researchers can access grid computing resources with the flexibility of the Internet.

OMII-Europe was established in 2006 and the University of Southampton was appointed as the co-ordinating partner within a 16-partner project involving major European, American and Chinese institutes involved in grid middleware development.

OMII-Eur0pe was established to provide key software components for building e-Infrastructures within the European Research Area (ERA). The initial focus for OMII-Europe was to facilitate the development and porting of a common set of application level services to a number of major grid software distributions, and to develop tighter interoperability between those distributions.

These software components are also being adopted by a number of other European research initiatives such as WISDOM which is focused on developing drugs for malaria and other neglected and emerging diseases. Dr Alistair Dunlop, who was instrumental in forging this collaboration, commented: 'Up until now, scientists could only talk to their own networks. Our software makes it possible for them to talk across various networks and to take forward the state of the art in grid technology and increase the range of computational power available to e-scientists.'

The first of a new series of ECS Energy Lectures takes place on Wednesday 14 May with a presentaton by Professor Mark O'Malley of University College Dublin.

Renewable energy has the potential to simultaneously reduce Ireland’s harmful emissions and improve its security of supply. This presentation will concentrate on renewable energy for the bulk production of electricity. The renewable resources will be introduced and costs characteristics will be compared. These comparisons are limited as they do not take into account the need to harvest this energy via the electricity network (i.e. the grid) and the associated technical issues of integration of these renewable resources. Variable renewable resources such as wind, wave and solar pose particular challenges due to the need to maintain real time supply demand balance i.e. frequency control. These issues will be developed further and the need for reserves and flexible plant will be discussed.

In addition the capacity value concept will be introduced and the role of forecasting, storage and inertia will be described. The reasons for curtailing renewable energy resources (i.e. dumping the energy) will be briefly illustrated. Further harvesting challenges e.g. network development will be briefly covered before the results of a full techno economic analysis of grid integrated wind power in Ireland are given and the other relevant renewable grid integration studies will be highlighted. The opportunity for Ireland to lead the world in the development of solutions to the harvesting of renewable energy will be highlighted before conclusions and further work are put forward for consideration.

Prof O'Malley is the Professor of Electrical Engineering at University College Dublin (UCD) and the Director of the industry supported Electricity Research Centre. He is a member of the Engineering Sciences Panel of the European Research Council and a Member of the IEEE Ethics and Member Conduct Committee. He is a technical consultant to the All Island Grid Study and regularly consults to clients in the Electricity Industry.

The lecture begins at 4 pm in the Nightingale Lecture Theatre, with tea and biscuits available from 3.30 pm. All are welcome.

Researchers in the ECS Nano Group have won the 2007 award for best paper in Measurement Science, given by the Institute of Physics journal, Measurement Science and Technology.

The paper, 'Broadband single cell impedance spectroscopy using maximum length sequences: theoretical analysis and practical considerations' was written by Tao Sun, Shady Gawad, Catia Bernabini, Nicolas G Green and Hywel Morgan.

It describes a novel impedance spectroscopic measurement method for applications in the identification of biological cells. The frequency-dependent impedance is obtained in the frequency domain by applying a fast M-sequence transform (FMT), and a fast Fourier transform (FFT) in the time domain response. Using FMT, the evaluation takes place within a short timescale of the order of milliseconds. This technique is used in a microfluidic impedance cytometer, for the analysis of single biological cells in suspension. The theory of the technique is analysed in depth. It is then applied to an experimental system that characterizes the impedance spectrum of red blood cells within the microfluidic system. Measured spectra show good agreement with simulations.

The journal citation noted: 'The paper has a short but excellent introduction, supported by a solid reference list of about 55 papers describing related work. Most of these papers are citations from 2000 onwards. This is followed by a detailed analysis of maximum length sequences and theory used for predictions of spectra. It then continues with a useful description of a cytometer that was used to confirm theoretical predictions of spectra. Results are at an early stage.

'The system is still under development, since there are issues arising from the fact that the particle flows during the acquisition of data, and is not static in the electric field as assumed by the model. Nevertheless, the paper possesses good clarity of the motivation behind the work, of the measurement techniques developed and of the potential relevance to applications in the life sciences.'

In April, Weidong Gong, a third-year PhD student in the Nano Group, supervised by Professor Hywel Morgan, Dr Michael Kraft and Dr Matt Mowlem, won third prize in the student poster competition at the Conference Oceans'08 MTS/IEEE Kobe-Techno-Ocean-08, held in Japan. The subject of his poster was 'Oceanographic sensor for in-situ temperature and conductivity monitoring'. He has already designed a double beam spectrosocopy for nitrite sensor, and is also developing a precision temperature and conductivity sensor for in-situ application.